The Wright Stuff: Homebuilding Expands the Aviation Experience

Metal Illness allowed me to fly when, where, and for how long I wanted. My longest single flight was four hours, my shortest was 10 minutes. Renting an airplane didn’t give me that flexibility. (Photo: Mark Schaible)

[An author’s apology. I’m uncomfortable with the number of self-references in this article. I (ugh, there’s another one) have no better way to convey the impact building an airplane can have on one’s life than by sharing the impact it had on my life. I can’t imagine how my life would look today if I hadn’t built an airplane for the simple reason I wanted to build an airplane.]

On the evening of Thursday, July 6, 2006, Fargo, North Dakota, lay shrouded in haze and hidden by a low-hanging sun. Hector International Airport’s tower spoke only to me. My landing was unremarkable. The general aviation ramp was empty. The 24-hour FBO, closed. Fargo was an overnight stop on my way to Minot, North Dakota. Both harbored memories; the memories that fuse to the music of one’s youth. Alone on the ramp, with competing thoughts of my past, the present, and my immediate future, I exited Metal Illness, my plans-built Sonex.

While building Metal Illness, I foresaw flight because flight is the implied goal of building an airplane. I knew my garage-built airplane could get me to any airport on a sectional. What I didn’t foresee was that every airport I’d visit—whether intentionally or by chance, for fuel, food, or refuge from weather—would be its own experience; not just a stop, but an experience. My seemingly inconspicuous arrival in Fargo would prove, again, that Metal Illness could even take me places sitting on the ground.

The Wright Stuff

What drives someone to build an airplane? A primary factor is the unique flavors of flying Experimental/Amateur-Built aviation offers: low and slow designs that recall the ’30s, aerobatic biplanes, warbird replicas, smooth-skinned commuters. The ability to experiment and innovate, and to do one’s own maintenance and inspections, also plays a role. So does ignorance. Ignorance of the scope and the cost, in time and in dollars, of an activity widely marketed as “quick,” “easy,” and “affordable.”

When building an airplane it is important to focus on the smallest tasks, not be fantasizing about future flights. That’s where the desire to build is important. That desire will get you through the tedious and difficult tasks. The rewards of flying are greater when you do a good job building, as the effort equates to more flying and less maintenance. The hours I spent building were enjoyed, and never tracked. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

No matter your personal attraction to a particular homebuilt—I’ve been attracted to dozens over the years—the only reason to build an airplane is because one desires to build an airplane. Yes, both words require emphasis. The desire to build is critical—as critical as cowboy hats to rodeos. Ignorance gets many started; desire delivers those who finish to the flight line. For most who undertake the activity, building hours will eclipse flying hours. If it’s flying you crave, buy or rent a general aviation aircraft, for building cannot be dismissed as something to endure to acquire an airplane.

Part and parcel to wanting to build is wanting to learn. I grew up surrounded by woodworking. My early taste in homebuilts leaned to all-wood designs. I recall, at age 14, staring at the fiberglass fuel tank in the plans of the “all wood” Evans VP-1 like it was a bent rim on my bicycle. The ways of fiberglass were shrouded in mystery. They were still shrouded in mystery 30 years later, when I customized and fine-tuned the fiberglass parts of my “all metal” Sonex. At first, I cut fiberglass cloth like a dressmaker, including voids in my flat patterns so they’d conform to the compound curves of my custom light fairing. The effort was unnecessary, of course. Fiberglass, I learned, conforms to compound curves when soaked with epoxy and poked with a paintbrush.

Builders who persevere join a small society of people who have built—from parts and plans and personal fortitude—a machine that flies; an extremely small society of people with The Wright Stuff. Of those, I believe many see the airworthiness certificate as their diploma, the first flight as the pinnacle of their effort. Many are ignorant of the rewards that lie ahead. I was. Those rewards are impossible to predict.

Flying Through Seasons, Space, and Time

Struggling against the wind of the upper Great Plains, I tethered Metal Illness to Fargo’s ramp and coerced the canopy cover in place. Although I didn’t have reservations (until I entered my room later that evening), a hotel in the walkable distance was my next waypoint. However, unknown to me, Metal Illness had altered those plans. A motorcycle, the only thing moving on the airfield, was silently growing larger as it drew nearer. Upon arrival its rider, Bill Cowden, told me he recognized my airplane from a magazine.

Bill Cowden, himself a homebuilder, sheltered my airplane in the Fargo Air Museum and invited me to log hangar flying time with this crew the night I arrived. The next morning, to my surprise, he insisted I log Texan time before I departed.

“Are you on your way to Oshkosh?” he asked.

“I’m on my way from Oshkosh, heading to the Northern Neighbors Day airshow at Minot Air Force Base,” I replied.

He nodded toward my airplane. “Wanna put it in a hangar?”

It was an offer a pilot of a Cessna or Beechcraft would not have received and one I would not refuse. I followed him to a corner of the airport and was surprised by the destination. Bill opened the hangar and pointed to a space in front of a T-6 Texan, under the smile of Duggy the DC-3, in the Fargo Air Museum. Bill was the assistant director of the museum, a Delta Air Lines pilot, and an F-16 pilot in the North Dakota Air National Guard’s “Happy Hooligans.” With Metal Illness secured for the evening, Bill passed me the keys to the museum’s courtesy car, shared a discount code for the hotel, and invited me to join the hangar flying session my arrival had punctuated. I accepted all.

Later that evening the museum’s 1985 courtesy car (the car’s year of manufacture was not lost on me) carried me to the nucleus of my memories of Fargo: North Dakota State University’s Sevrinson Hall. I spent many weekends there, in the fall of 1984, with a girlfriend who left Minot for NDSU three months before I left Minot for Guam. There was little to hint that 20 years had passed. Had the wings that cleaved the air to carry me to this physical location in only three hours also carried me back two decades in time?

It wasn’t the first time I experienced time travel in my Sonex. Once I departed Oshkosh in early spring, pointed Metal Illness south, and landed later that day, in summer, in Florida. We take dramatic seasonal and geographical shifts for granted when we board a pressurized tube, but they can come as a surprise when accomplished in an airplane built with our own hands, in a garage. A week later, in a single daylight-starved day, Metal Illness turned the calendar back to early spring when I pointed it north. It seems one can only linger in the future. Standing in Sevrinson Hall’s parking lot, I learned one should not dwell on the past.

Lessons Learned

Renting airplanes contributed to my already strong desire to build an airplane. As a renter I logged 135 flight hours spread thinly over 20 years. How thinly? The first 60 hours were accumulated in seven months, while satisfying the requirements for a private pilot certificate and retaining proficiency until my 17th birthday and the private pilot checkride. Follow-up hours were constrained by all that goes with renting: weather that’s contradictory to a VFR pilot’s schedule, broken aircraft, renters who depart late and return even later, four-hour rental minimums to fly 90 minutes for a hamburger. My recreational flights became one hour in duration. That fit the rental schedule but constrained my range and the range of my flying experiences. Soon, there was little reason to fly other than to stay current. Current for what?

Suspending flight after earning a private pilot certificate is common in general aviation. Earning the certificate is reason to fly and fly frequently. Once certificated, the formerly surmountable obstacles to flying (money, time, aircraft availability) seem to grow larger. I hung up my wings, but not my dream of building an airplane.

When the weather is bad you may not be able to fly but you can still build an airplane. Some hours inside the fuselage of Metal Illness eventually put me back inside the bomb bay of a B-52, where I had worked 20 years prior. (Photos: Kerry Fores)

A Military Send-off

Friday morning I pulled Metal Illness onto the museum’s ramp by its propeller. A 650-pound airplane is handled with ease by one person. Two tons of AT-6 Texan, I found, can be stubborn. While hangar flying the night before I mentioned the Texan had been a favorite of mine since childhood. (Thinking back, every airplane was my favorite at one time, but the Texan had staying power. It still does.) My comment became a calling for Bill, who wouldn’t let me leave without a ride. We played hangar Tetris for a good long while, until it seemed a pardon from North Dakota’s governor may be needed to free the Texan. I began volunteering a series of outs, but Bill persisted. Our final, successful move was to pivot the T-6’s wingtip under the nose of the P-51 while rotating the Mustang’s propeller out of the way.

The Texan’s cavernous cockpit swallowed me and surrounded me. Engaging the wide-spaced rudder pedals felt like straddling a horse. The joystick was a longboat’s oar compared to the stub in my Sonex. We looped and rolled two tons of WW-II trainer over the flat plain west of Fargo for 20 minutes. I was gifted command for a period.

“Your airplane,” said Bill.

“My (my!) airplane.”

If I give it much thought (and I did), my 2006 flight in a T6 Texan was set in motion in 1984, by my then-girlfriend’s choice of college, and boosted in 1998 with my decision to build an airplane. Both events were key parts in putting me inverted over North Dakota in a T-6 Texan. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

On downwind I slid the canopy open to squelch the cockpit’s heat. Doing so did nothing to lessen the combined aromas of avgas, hot oil, old canvas, and hydraulic fluid. Another Fargo memory had been made, this one with a Wasp radial engine for the soundtrack. An hour later, under the closed canopy of my Sonex, I had no way to lessen the heat while waiting for two “Happy Hooligans” F-16s to depart with an unrestricted climb to 35,000 feet. Metal Illness and I were cleared to the west-northwest and climbed to 3,000 feet AGL, where haze from wildfires clouded my vision like cataracts. We descended to 1,000 feet AGL and traced U.S. Route 52 toward Minot, in search of missile silos and a night from 1983.

In hindsight, these unusual clouds were a clue time travel was in process. No lightning flashes, no distorted vision. Just swirling clouds. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

A Paper Airplane and A Fork on My Flightline

I met many builders whose lives were also changed by homebuilding. One whose life expectancy surpassed his cancer prognosis because he had an airplane to finish and fly. Another, Jim Reichard, pictured here, who, in his early 50s, achieved his dream of becoming an airline pilot because the airplane he built allowed him to accumulate hours at an affordable cost and a rapid rate. I know others who started aviation businesses after building an airplane and identifying an opportunity within the aviation community. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

I grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It’s been home to EAA’s fly-in since I was 6. By age 10 I was all-in on aviation—all of aviation—though I can’t say what role the week-long fly-in played, as my exposure to it was limited by my age. By age 12, most likely fueled by a stack of Sport Aviation magazines given to me by a homebuilding friend of my father, I had taken a strong interest in homebuilts. At 14 I traded lawn mowing savings for plans for the Evans VP-1, which I studied daily and kept hidden under my bed. My request to build the VP-1’s tail as a senior project was denied by my woodworking teacher.

Over the next two decades my involvement in aviation was hit and miss and almost completely bound to the ground. The VP-1 was never started. A Pietenpol was started, suspended, restarted, and resuspended. An attempt was made at the rudder of a Graham Lee Nieuport 17, but aluminum was a scary material to me.

In 1996, on a routine lunch visit to the airport, I became privy to the still-secret Sonex. It was nothing more than preliminary drawings and probably a scattering of parts I wouldn’t have recognized. It was then—right then—that my 20-plus-year search for an airplane project ended.

The Sonex—so new it was called “The ‘Plane”—struck me as The One. Never mind it was metal, a material that gave me pause. Never mind it had never flown. Never mind it didn’t physically exist. My desire to build became a need. In that regard, I had abundance. What I lacked was money, tools, a working relationship with aluminum, and space. Those, I figured, could be earned, learned, bought, borrowed, or found.

Zonnie Fritsche (right), chairman of AirVenture’s AeroShell Square (now Boeing Square) and a builder himself, arranged for me to “tour” the west ramp with Metal Illness. As excited as I was at the opportunity, he was even more excited to provide it. Building an airplane introduced me to so many outstanding people.

In 1999 the Sonex wing plans were released and I started building mine from $1,400 of 6061-T6 aluminum sheet and angle—enough material to build the entire airframe. As I built, opportunities to help the fledgling aircraft company arose. I bartered technical writing for 10,000 rivets and extruded spar caps. I took vacation from my job to help staff the Sonex Aircraft AirVenture booth. I surrendered four weekends a year to assist with builder workshops. To help finance my airplane, I started an online retail business selling the aviation lithographs of accomplished artists, and I sold plasma, always my own. For 60 months the airplane gestated in my garage, never foreshadowing it would be anything more than an airplane. Never indicating it was shaping my entire future.

In 2002 my employer of 11 years told me I was next for a 6-month rolling layoff. I mentioned that bit of news on my almost-daily visit to Sonex Aircraft, where I spent lunch with the three principals of the three-person company and their stalwart volunteer, George Rotter; 30 years earlier George gave my dad a box of Sport Aviation magazines to give to me. Jeremy Monnett offered me a job “for as long as there is work to do.” There was always work to do. I retired from Sonex Aircraft in 2023.

I overcame my fear of “metal” to build the airplane I wanted. Here, EAA is filming me building an aluminum wing rib for one of their metalworking DVDs. Student becomes teacher. (Photo: EAA)

One of many memorable experiences that resulted from building an airplane was being awarded Plans Built Champion at AirVenture 2006. (Head homebuilt judge Dave Juchem, left, Kerry Fores, right.) Like many first-time builders who have been surprised by the honor, winning an award was never my goal. My goals were to enjoy the project, conquer new skills, impart my best effort and end up with an airplane that would allow me to fly where and when I wanted. (Photo: Ann Hammond Olejnik)

Looking Down, Looking Around, Looking Back

Pingree, North Dakota, is a grain elevator, railroad wye, and a cemetery at the intersection of U.S. Route 52 and North Dakota Highway 36. Its two-score citizens get about on gravel roads. I slept there in 1983, in a Triumph sports car, after running out of gas late one evening. It was an uncomfortable night; not only physically, trying to sleep in a sports car, but also mentally. I both hoped someone would stop and worried they would. Twenty-three years later, from the cockpit of my hand-built airplane, I gazed down on that intersection as if I were examining the ancient light of a star through a telescope. But I wasn’t. I was looking back at a moment of my life.

After landing at Minot International Airport I secured a rental car and permission to take a self-guided tour of Minot Air Force Base. To fly into the base for the next day’s show, civilian pilots—there were maybe 10 civilian aircraft that attended—needed to be vetted weeks in advance and our arrival by air preauthorized. Nothing in the process provided access to the base outside of the show’s hours. I credit my pre-show access to homebuilding, as the base’s Northern Neighbors Day coordinator had a homebuilt in progress in his own garage.

Gaining unescorted access to a military installation that housed two prongs of the nuclear triad was a coup. Had I driven to the main gate that same day, or any day, without my airplane parked 14 miles away, positioned to attend the Northern Neighbors Day fly-in, I would have been turned away by stern and suspicious military police. My memories of the place that was my home for 19 months would have remained forever locked behind chain-link fence, barbed wire, lethal force, and the capacity of my mind to recall the details of a place and events; events that grow more distant every day.

The base seemed little changed in the two decades since I lived there. The same dented, faded brown doors protected my dorm’s entry from harsh winters and high winds. When they swung on their aging hinges, their metallic melody unlocked a vault of memories. Twenty-four hours earlier Minot existed as discolored photographs and 22-year-old vignettes that played in my mind when ’80s music played in my ears. Overnight the colors had been restored—well, maybe not on the doors to my old dorm—and the memories were refreshed. Sixty months building an airplane in my garage got me there. The next morning I would get it there.

No degree of fantasizing while I built my airplane would have put me, and it, on a ramp at Minot AFB with a B-52. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

I set Metal Illness down on MAFB’s 13,000-foot-long runway with 12,500 feet to spare. As I taxied past the RCAF Snowbirds I picked out a flagman who guided me to park alongside a B-52, on a ramp stained by the fluids that sustain both flight and deterrence. A humid breeze mixed their aromas with prairie grass and the hum of kerosene-powered generators. The alchemy carried my thoughts back to my days loading weapons into the same B-52s that populated the flight line. I lingered in the cascading memories, eyes closed, nose held high, like an aging retriever recalling a hunt, and let the pieces and the people of my past resurface. The alchemy of aluminum, rivets, fiberglass resin, and acetone in a kerosene-heated garage made it possible.

In the 1930s Bernie Pietenpol designed the Air Camper to be built by “the average American.” Nearly 100 years later it remains a popular plans-built design, one that can be started, and finished, on the smallest budget. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

Plans, Parts, Kits, and Commitment: Taking the First Step

How does one build an airplane? At the risk of sounding simplistic, one part at a time. Having done it myself, and having been a cheerleader for hundreds of builders over my career, “one part at a time” is the truest answer I can distill from the endeavor. Homebuilding is not unlike running: marathons, 5Ks, and casual jogs are all accomplished one step at a time. Without a desire to run, however, even a casual jog is a struggle.

The Christen Eagle was the big bang of the aircraft kit market. Prior to its dramatic rollout in 1977, aircraft “kits” were mostly plans, raw materials, and premade components like cowlings, canopies, machined components, etc. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

Homebuilding is rooted in aircraft that were meant to be built from plans and builder-sourced materials. That path, called “plans building” or “scratch building,” dominated homebuilding from the 1930s, when the ever-popular Pietenpol Air Camper was introduced, to the 1970s, the decade that ushered in the kit-plane era. Kits make sophisticated designs more accessible and can reduce building time. The undisputed pioneer of the airplane kit was Frank Christen. His Christen Eagle II, which debuted in 1977, was so complete, the story goes, it included a razor blade to open the boxes. Today, “complete kit” means different things to each kit manufacturer, as do the terms “quick build,” “affordable,” and “easy.” One thing hasn’t changed: kit airplanes, like plans-built airplanes, require desire to complete.

Though kits expanded the homebuilding market, the initial commitment can be equivalent to signing up for a marathon before you’ve run a 5K. While a plans builder can start (and give up) inexpensively, kit builders can face five-digit entry fees. To blunt that blow, many kit manufacturers offer subkits. Subkits allow builders to purchase major subassemblies (tail, wings, fuselage, etc.) as their pace, space, and budget allow. Tail kits, the unofficial learning bear of the kit plane industry, are $2,000 and up.

Recognizing another hurdle on the path to homebuilding, some kit manufacturers, and EAA, offer workshops and other resources to teach key skills. Many manufacturers also offer airframe kits with up to 49% of the work (the legal limit for the E-AB category, where amateurs must do at least 51% of the work) completed by the factory. Still, the decision to build any airplane must be based on the desire to build. Even builders who aren’t deterred by price may come to find the time commitment, or a need to learn specific skills, isn’t for them. The dropout rate for homebuilders is high. Many who start never finish. Many homebuilts that eventually fly weren’t completed by the person who began the project. The reasons are many and can all be categorized under the heading “life.” Those who start, finish, and go on to fly their airplane have The Wright Stuff. What that is exactly can’t be defined, but luck and circumstances play roles. I knew one builder who had to outlive his cancer diagnosis to finish and fly his airplane. He credited outrunning his expiration date on his airplane project.

As I approached Fargo, I didn’t know my past was hiding vividly inside this sunset, or that my evening and next morning would be altered so dramatically by my homebuilt. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

Back to My Future

Sunday morning, under a rested, clear sky, I prepared Metal Illness for the flight home. Before returning east I planned to overfly Rice Lake, another vessel of youthful memories, south of Minot. On climb-out, however, I saw low clouds between me and the lake. I turned east, away from the clouds and those memories, and climbed above a thin layer of scattered clouds whose swirling form recalled Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Eventually, I sacrificed blue above for visual contact with the ground. Under a thin layer of gauzy clouds, in an atmosphere of muted light and dull colors, I flew toward a horizon that teased a clear sky ahead. I reached that horizon just past Fargo, which was again concealed by haze. Descending from a cloudless, azure sky, I landed for fuel at Alexandria, Minnesota. In movies, time travel happens quickly and often with stunning visual effects. That day it took 2 hours and 42 minutes, and went unnoticed until I read the date on the fuel receipt: July 9, 2006. The past was again in my past.

On the evening of Sunday, July 9, 2006, I pushed Metal Illness back into its hangar in Oshkosh. My life had been further enriched, memories had been layered upon memories, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences unfolded because I built an airplane—not just flew an airplane, but built an airplane.

We need only look to Paul Poberezny, EAA’s founder, to see the impact the very personal decision to build an airplane, not just fly an airplane, can have on one’s life and the lives of others. (Photo: Kerry Fores)

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